


people don't stay in love forever

by silverkatana



Category: Super Junior
Genre: Angst, Falling Out of Love, Goodbyes, M/M, No Plot, Rain, love and heartbreak
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 16:54:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21122117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverkatana/pseuds/silverkatana
Summary: it wasn't supposed to end like this.it wasn't supposed to end at all.(but it did.)





	people don't stay in love forever

It’s raining, the falling droplets creating soft patters of noise against the windowsill. He sucks in a breath, harsh and jarring, feeling the cold of the barely-spring air hit him with an unpleasant intensity. 

Heechul sits across from him, looking elsewhere, coat draped loosely across his slender frame, hair red and eyes glazed. He’s the first one to break the silence. It’s dragged on for too long.

“Heechul,” he says, gentle at first, like the rain falling around them, and then harsher later, like the fatter droplets landing in jagged streaks against the roof. “Heechul.”

Heechul meets his gaze, dark and troubled inside, and he sees his own reflection staring back, small and lost and confused, mind empty save the sound of rain and heart full with unspoken affliction. 

“We didn’t have to do it like this,” he continues, voice low, but he’s sure Heechul can hear anyway. The sound of the rain is growing louder and drowning out his thoughts, so he shuts his eyes tight, fervently searching for the words burying themselves too deep in his heart for him to properly grasp. 

When he re-opens them, Heechul is still staring at him, seeing and unseeing all at once, his features clouded with conflict.  _ He looks beautiful like that _ , he thinks, eyes softening as he takes in the creases in Heechul’s expression and the pain in his eyes.  _ Haunted _ .

“Not on such a sad day.” He exhales a long breath, and it hangs in the air between them, unbroken and broken all at once, falling soft as the rain into the silence that lingers for moments too long. 

The first time Heechul speaks to him, his voice cuts across the room with the force of a thousand surrenders and shatters the quietude like it’s made of glass, and he can feel his breath escaping his chest and hanging suspended in time before him as he listens to Heechul’s every word.

“Then how would you have wanted us to do this, Jungsoo?” Heechul whispers out at last, his eyes boring into Jungsoo’s, his features steeled again, looking so put together but sounding so fallen apart all at the same time. It’s a beautiful thing to witness, Jungsoo thinks; a mess to see, but a beautiful mess nonetheless. “What would have been a better way?”

He knows his voice is going to waver before it does; he lets it spill out of him nonetheless, half-whispered, half-shouted syllables riddled with cracks and dripping with a special kind of desperate helplessness. “I don’t know,” he says, and then repeats it again, and then a third time - and the pain in his voice is ringing so loud in his head that he’s sure Heechul can hear every bit of it too.

Heechul doesn’t reply for a long time.

“Don’t cry,” he says at last, voice even, words betraying nothing, eyes revealing everything.

_ But it’s raining in your heart, too, _ Jungsoo wants to protest, but he’s too tired and the day is too sad for arguing anymore, so he responds with an ‘okay’. Heechul nods his head, just a slight dip of acknowledgement, and they resume their tension-filled comfortable silence, sitting with hollow gazes in a room saturated with withheld words and the surrounding sound of splattering rain.

“You’re going to cry,” Heechul says suddenly, lifting his eyes to meet Jungsoo’s, and Jungsoo almost startles at the intensity behind his dark eyes that read Jungsoo’s own easier than words printed on a storybook. (Jungsoo almost lets himself break at how powerless he feels under that gaze, but he keeps himself together, because they’ve gone too far for him to let himself to fall apart like this.)

“No, I’m not.” He allows the faintest echoes of stubbornness to enter his tone, if just for a moment, before he leans back against the wall and lets a sigh flit past his lips in a low tremble. “I told you I wasn’t going to cry.”

Heechul’s lips curve upwards in a small smile - is it a smirk? He can’t tell anymore - at Jungsoo’s response; Jungsoo always found it admirable how Heechul managed to put a smile on his face even in the most devastating of circumstances (even if it wasn’t always real). “You’re a bad liar.”

“And so are you,” he retorts, watching as Heechul’s eyebrows knit together and as the smile disappears from his face, replaced instead by mild confoundment. 

His voice is still steady when he speaks. Jungsoo would hate him for being able to act so calm if he had the power in him to hate Heechul. “What do you mean by that? I’m not crying, you are. I’m not lying to you.”

Jungsoo draws a breath, ragged and tired, and forces a smile onto his face. He knows Heechul sees through it right away. They’ve known each other for far too long to get mixed up between truths and lies, after all. “Don’t pretend you aren’t as broken as I am,” he says, his words starting out forceful, but then fading into gentle exhaustion. “Don’t pretend your heart isn’t crying for the both of us, because I know you’re sad, I know you’re shattered just like I am and you know you can’t hide that from me.”

He lets a breathless laugh shimmer through him at the hints of surprise showing on Heechul’s face. “Two can play at this game, Heechul. You can read me better than you can read any book, and that’s fair enough. But our relationship wasn’t a one-sided thing, and you know that. I can see through all the masks you put up as easily as you can see through mine. So just… don’t bother lying to me.”

Heechul doesn’t respond - or doesn’t know how to respond, Jungsoo isn’t sure of which one. The distorted disquietude of silence settles over them again like a suffocating blanket, and Jungsoo closes his eyes again, listening to his shaky breaths in the still air and the sound of the rain outside falling in soothing steady rhythms.

The rain is getting slower, Jungsoo notes subconsciously; the sound of the rain falling like crystal tears against the windowsill is softer now, more languid, like the feeling of the afternoon sun bleeding into the gentle hues of dusk. 

It makes his thoughts ring so much louder in his head.

When he opens his eyes again, he’s crying, his tears falling like crystal rain against his cold cheeks, his throat clogged and his heart ramming so hard against his chest he feels like his ribcages may break. Heechul is staring at him from across the room, eyes wide, hair falling across his face in messy strands and a haunted look crisscrossed like scars along his features.

“You said you wouldn’t cry,” Heechul murmurs, but his words have lost their biting touch, and his lips waver with unspoken things he doesn’t quite know how to say aloud, his eyes misty with a broken tenderness spilt forth from his heart.

“I wouldn’t have wanted us to do this,” Jungsoo blurts out, his words thick with emotions he doesn’t know how to identify, but he knows Heechul can understand him all the same. “If we had a choice, I wouldn’t have wanted this at all. None of this, no matter what form it took.” He sucks in a breath, and it’s rough and harsh and cold, so cold, and the tears and the bitterness of the tears shudder through him all the more with every fresh breath drawn. “I didn’t mean to fall in love with you, but then I did. And you didn’t mean to fall in love with me, but you did. And we didn’t mean for what had been nothing to become something, but it did, and then for a moment we were everything, and I was so happy, you know? It felt like I had the world,” he finds it harder to continue speaking now, his words being lost to the pain blossoming in his heart and the tears running in streaks down his face, “Maybe you were my world for a moment there. Funny now that we think of it, huh?”

Heechul doesn’t have it in him to crack a smile at Jungsoo’s words.

“I didn’t want this to happen,” he chokes out, inhaling sharply. He never knew breathing could be so hard. “I didn’t want to fall in love with you just to be left with heartbreak like this. I don’t want any of this, Heechul, how could I possibly want any of this?” His shoulders are shaking from how hard he’s crying, and he can feel everything shattering and crashing down within him, but at this point he doesn’t have the strength to care anymore. “We went from having something to having everything, so how I can be okay with having nothing all over again? How do you expect me to be okay when I’m losing the one I’ve been in love with for half of my life? How can you tell me not to cry when even crying isn’t enough to fully express all the pain I’m feeling?” His words spill out of him uncontrollably, punctuated by faint gasps of air and the sound of his tears catching in his throat, and he curls into himself, his fingernails digging into his palm. “I didn’t fall in love just to fall out of it. I tried my best, damn it, I gave everything I could because I didn’t want this to happen.”

He looks up at Heechul, his expression tormented with a thousand unanswered insecurities and a million unasked questions, haunted by the peace of the past and the pain of the present, and under Heechul’s quivering gaze, he lets himself break.

“I’m so sorry,” he rasps out in the end, his tone defeated and heavy and thick with all the feelings he couldn’t express, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want this to happen. Not like this… Not like any other way. I didn’t want this to happen.” He meets Heechul’s gaze, and he wonders if Heechul can see the pure devastation in his own. “But it did.”

_ It did, and I couldn’t stop it. _

Heechul’s arms are around his, holding him close amidst his tears and his choked words and the sound of rain on the windowsill, and he’s warm, so warm, and Jungsoo clings on to him like he’s clinging on to dear life, and when he wraps his own arms tight around Heechul, fingernails digging into Heechul’s shoulders, it feels familiar, so familiar, too familiar, and he’s crying harder, letting his tears seep into Heechul’s coat; and he knows Heechul’s crying, too, because his own coat is hanging loose off his shoulder and he can feel the wetness of Heechul’s tears soaking past his shirt and into his skin.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispers again, and again, and again. “I tried my best.”

Heechul lets Jungsoo go limp in his arms, his voice a comforting whisper in the saturated sorrow, his words coming out soft and gentle and affectionate and everything in between. “I know you did,” he murmurs, “You tried your best, you really did, and you have nothing to be sorry for.”

“It wasn’t supposed to end like this,” Jungsoo responds hoarsely, “It wasn’t supposed to end at all.”

Heechul’s crying harder now, Jungsoo notes absentmindedly, feeling the way the small tremors flutter their way through his body.

They stand like that for a long time, seeking solace from their suffocating thoughts in the warmth of each other’s embrace, until the rain stops and all is quiet around them.

“People don’t stay in love forever,” Heechul whispers to him, eyes closed, head resting on his shoulder like it was meant to be there all along. “No one falls in love expecting heartbreak to come… But that’s the way the world works, I guess, and that’s the way the world worked for you and me.”

“I’m sorry,” Jungsoo repeats.

_ I’m sorry you’re the one I fell out of love with. _

“Don’t be,” Heechul replies.

_ I’m sorry I’m the one you fell out of love with. _

“Just for now,” Jungsoo says, a quiet desperation to his voice, “Can we stay like this?”

_ I’m not ready to let you go yet. _

Heechul wraps his arms a little tighter around Jungsoo. “Okay,” he mumbles back, and Jungsoo can hear the faint smile in his voice amidst the throes of pain and grief weighing it down. “Okay.”

_ Let’s pretend that this isn’t the end, just for now. _

“We’ll be okay, right?”

“We’ll be okay.”

_ People don’t stay in love forever. _

_ And I’m so sorry that it had to be us. _

**Author's Note:**

> wow it's been a long time since i've written teukchul huh?
> 
> twitter: @sjpetals


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